I’m developing a Gatsby site locally. I have it under version control and on a private Github repo. I don’t have full buy-in on Netlify and Gatsby from the boss yet and it would be awesome to use to use netlify dev --live to let the boss see a working prototype before putting the site on Netlify. I don’t want the site to be publicly accessible. Password protection would solve this problem for me, but again, I don’t have buy in just yet, so I can’t pony up for a paid account yet.

Yup, that’s the default and the “happy path” our UI tries to guide you into, but you can instead choose to deploy a site in different ways:

drag and drop - probably simplest, zip up a folder with some files in it and drag to that same screen showing the git button (there should be a dotted-line box at the bottom of that page, which you can drop content into). See https://www.netlify.com/docs/manual-deploys/ for more details.

but still I need some sort of commit to link a Netlify site to a git repo i have on a dev machine, correct? This is probably a bit of an edge case and I don’t think I’ll have too much trouble getting buy-in, so no biggie. I was just excited to try out Netlify dev --live but don’t want to push my whole repo to Netlify just yet.

Hmm, I don’t think you do need to do that. I think you can deploy with no git connection at all, just by running netlify sites:create from your local copy, and once you have that (local) content deployed, you can use netlify dev without any need for anything git-related.